Quote:
Originally Posted by Bassnut
I understand US universities have a long standing tradition of "old boys" and the companies they own/work for providing huge funding for the unis they graduated from. This funding source is the difference between OZ and the US, not gov support. Is that right Scott?.
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It depends...
No doubt that former graduates that have done well do steer money and projects back to their Alma Maters and this does help fund many Department Chairs and build bright shiny labs. However, I think the bulk of the money is more company/industry focused...in addition the US Government is still a large funder of basic research in many different forms.
What I mean is that industry/companies tend not want to avoid paying for infrastructure (and actively negotiate the amount paid for overheads) in projects. They only want to pay for the activity...so the "old boys" tend to donate their personal wealth to pay for the infrastructure (name abuilding/lab/ teaching position)...
I've not seen any offical figures in a while but would guess the split at 1/3 government and 2/3rds industry in terms of funding. The government money is split beween University research and "Government Lab" research but this line gets blurred pretty quickly.
Now it is quite common for Universities to start with Government "seed money" and then shop the results to Industry after proof of concept and accelerate it to development. License agreements are worked out on the Intellectual Property and the funding stream to some degree is self fulfilling.
The "Land Grant" Universities themselves (specifically focused on Science - Agriculture and Engineering) were established by President Lincoln and that really got the system going. Reading about these Land Grant Universities is pretty illuminating and their existence helped fuel the expansion and growth of the USA...heck for a farm boy like me, they represented a way for me to get educated and advance. My family could never have been able to afford a "private" university for all 5 boys. This feeling of gratitude is common and feeds back into the "old boys" wanting to give back.